One of These Days (I’m Going To)
buy myself a giant, high-calorie tub of chocolate ice cream with nuts and raisins and eat it without feeling guilty, thoroughly clean my bathroom and leave it smelling like lavender, drink a strong double espresso after eating the ice cream, grow my moustache and beard for a week, repair the roof of the tool shed, start studying Latin through a YouTube tutorial, encourage myself to play the original version of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition in its entirety on my old piano, prune the ivy on the back wall of the garden, apologize to my childhood friends for treating them so badly, take a diving course in the Caribbean to swim with the turtles, spit into the wind and hope the spit doesn’t hit me back, buy a French Bulldog and take lots of funny pictures of it to upload to YouTube, write a poem so beautiful and corny that I won’t show it to anyone, watch the movie Taxi Driver for the umpteenth time, get a Chinese imperial dragon tattooed on my left shoulder and a roaring lion on my right, buy a replica of the Smith & Wesson Magnum 44 pistol that Robert De Niro used in the “You Talkin’ to Me?” scene from Taxi Driver to recreate that scene in front of the mirror, do everything right instead of doing everything wrong, clean out my closet and give away all the clothes I no longer wear, cut my hair into a Mohawk like Robert De Niro’s character in Taxi Driver to scare my mother, eat a bucket of fried chicken with barbecue sauce and French fries, cut my toenails, paint the walls of my room black and stick glow-in-the-dark stars on them, finish reading all the books piled up on my nightstand and then buy a bunch more books to repeat the process, put a pond in my garden and raise Koi fish, learn Japanese so I can give my fish proper names, peel the glow-in-the-dark stars off my bedroom walls, paint them blue, and stick the stars back on, buy a karaoke machine and sing Japanese songs, take a “doodling course to reduce stress and anxiety,” plant a Japanese maple tree next to the pond to provide shade for my koi fish, buy a bouquet of yellow roses from the florist on the corner and give it to the first woman who smiles at me, go to Cappadocia to ride in a hot air balloon and see the world from up there, visit Liverpool and have my photo taken crossing Abbey Road like the Beatles, surf a giant wave in Australia to take a picture of myself and frame it, go to Patagonia in Argentina and look for a Jurassic dinosaur fossil, although I would settle for one from the Cretaceous period, hire the Red Hot Chili Peppers to celebrate my birthday and sing Under the Bridge as a duet with Anthony Kiedis, take a course in cryptozoology and then give lectures on a fictional animal invented by myself, plant a flag at the South Pole and make a video in favour of emperor penguin conservation, ask Robert De Niro for an autograph and a selfie to prove it’s real, dress up as Pennywise, the evil clown from It, go out and scare children on Halloween, buy a king-size bed and a feather duvet, study an endangered language from Nepal, get on a rocket to go space tourism, propose to the woman I gave the bouquet of yellow roses to, invite Robert De Niro to my wedding, have the Red Hot Chili Peppers sing at it, and go on honeymoon to Cappadocia to ride in a hot air balloon, make love to my wife in my king-size bed in my bedroom with light blue walls covered in glow-in-the-dark stars and tell her about when I went on a space tourism trip in a rocket, show my wife that beautiful, corny poem I promised I would never show anyone and tell her that she was my inspiration, even before I met her, drink a cold tequila on a deck chair next to my koi pond in the shade of my Japanese maple tree, accompanied by my wonderful wife, make a list of all the things I have left to do before I die, write a story so good that it talks about yellow roses, Koi fish, and Robert De Niro that magazines will fight to publish it.
Marcelo Medone (1961, Buenos Aires, Argentina) is a Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions nominee writer. He received numerous awards and was published in multiple languages in more than 50 countries, including the UK. He lives in Montevideo, Uruguay.